Who is BUNNIE XO? The Pop Enigma Taking Over the Charts
These days, there is a new power couple in the Nashville music scene — country rapper Jelly Roll and his platinum-blonde wife Bunnie XO! In 2022 he released the hit single “Son of a Sinner” and won three CMT Music Awards, while his wife thrived with her own social media and podcast empire. But who is Bunnie XO? Where did she come from, and how did she meet her bad-boy husband? And what are her plans for the future?
Raised by a single dad
Bunnie — real name “Alyssa” — was born in 1980 in Tennessee; she grew up raised primarily by her father Bill. You see, when she was only three months old, Bunnie’s biological mom had left her on a doorstep and disappeared from her life.
Her dad later remarried and did his best to raise his daughter. To this day, Bunnie insists, “My dad is the coolest dude I’ve ever known. We clash because I’m just like him, but there’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for my pops.”
She always wanted to make her dad laugh
During an episode of her Dumb Blonde podcast, Bunnie waxed lyrical about the love she has for her father, who was a working musician. She said, “The coolest story that I could ever tell people is that I was raised by a single dad.”
She added, “I think I always tried to make you happy as a kid because I always wanted to be your comedic relief. That was the relationship you and I always had — I just would say… [the weirdest] stuff to make you laugh.”
Leaving home at 14
At only 14 years old, though, Bunnie made a life-changing decision. Her relationship with her dad’s second wife had frayed to the point of no return, so she figured enough was enough and it was time for a change.
She admitted on her podcast, “I was tired of fist-fighting with this woman every day. So, I ran away from home.” She later admitted on Facebook that her family had said some hurtful things when she was leaving, including that she’d be “barefoot and pregnant by 15.”
She always knew she would be okay
The mixed-up young girl was also told by several people in her life that she would never amount to anything. Yet she maintains, “I never took to heart what anyone said, because I just knew I would always be okay, no matter what.”
Bunnie added, “I figure it out; it’s what I do.” She also made a choice early on to live by the mantra, “Life is tough, time waits for no one, but you have control of how you spend that time.”
Love at first sight?
The year 2015 was when everything changed for Bunnie. One evening she was partying in the Las Vegas Country Saloon, where an unknown country rap artist named Jelly Roll was playing a set. She had no idea who he was, but as he told Taste of Country, “We hit it off.”
He added, “She said she fell in love with the saddest eyes in the room.” Jelly revealed it was more than love at first sight for him. “I felt her soul. When I hugged her, I could just feel the genuineness of her. I could tell it wasn't an act.”
Becoming more than friends
At the time, both Bunnie and Jelly were in already relationships, but their emotional connection couldn’t be denied for long. They kept in touch with the help of some mutual friend.
Then when Bunnie broke up with her boyfriend — who was reportedly abusive — she made Jelly an offer he couldn’t refuse. He was going to be in Las Vegas for a photoshoot, and she said he could stay at her place for the night. It wound up being the start of a very beautiful relationship.
Gold-digger claims
Over the years, Bunnie has been subjected to a lot of accusations of gold-digging. After all, some cruel people say, there’s no other reason a glamorous woman like her would be with a plus-size man like Jelly.
Amazingly, though, Jelly isn’t offended when he hears this: it actually amuses him, because it’s so far from the truth. He chuckled, “I get tickled pink. I love it when they call her a gold-digger — that's my favorite thing. She hates it. It infuriates her, it just flames her up.”
She was the wealthier of the duo
You see, back when they got together, Jelly was far from the rich and famous star he is today. In fact, he was flat broke! He revealed, “It just tickles me pink because when I met her, I was homeless living out of a '96 conversion van. If anyone was digging for gold, it was I, Popeye!”
He added, “I was the one that was over here searching. I was couch-surfing and made it to the bedroom.” By contrast, as he told The Golden Hour podcast, Bunnie was living in a ritzy penthouse condominium at that point.
Jelly resolves to change his life
In truth, it was Bunnie’s financial situation that enabled Jelly to gain custody of his daughter Bailee. You see, in 2008 a 23-year-old Jelly was behind bars for dealing drugs — and this wasn’t the first time he’d been in prison. But this time he resolved to change his life by any means necessary.
He told Billboard, “May 22, 2008. A guard knocks on my cell door mid-afternoon during lockdown. He goes, ‘You had a kid today.’” The news came like a bolt of lightning out of the blue.
“I have to figure this out right now”
Jelly knew that he had impregnated a woman shortly before entering prison, but prior to this news, his attitude toward it had simply been irritation. Hearing that the baby had been born changed everything, though. As he put it, “I’ve never had nothing in life that urged me in the moment to know that I had to do something different.”
He added, “I have to figure this out right now.” So, the aspiring rap star enrolled in the prison’s education unit, got his General Educational Development (GED) certificate, and then met his daughter for the first time on her second birthday.
Jelly was seeking custody of his daughter
Initially, it wasn’t exactly easy for Jelly to be with his little girl. In the documentary Jelly Roll: Save Me, he admitted, “Bailee's mother made it hard on me at first. She made me go to court to even see her.”
Unfortunately, though, as Bailee got older, her mom began taking pain pills to cope with a medical condition, and her dependence on them wound up transforming into a heroin addiction. Jelly knew he needed to get full custody of his daughter, but he couldn’t pay the legal fees until Bunnie stepped in.
Bunnie provided the means
The couple hadn’t even been together for very long when this harrowing situation came up. During an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Jelly enthused, “This woman is like, ‘Look, I’m not 100 percent sure I’ll be with you, but I’m gonna do everything I can to help you with this little girl,’ because dude, I'm broke.”
The couple secured Bailee’s custody in 2017 and Jelly told Billboard, “I would have never got custody of my daughter without her. I wouldn’t have had the stability, or the money.”
Bunnie worked as a high-class escort
At this time, while Jelly was playing shows to 30 people and being lucky to get paid $100 for the privilege, Bunnie was making $30,000 to $40,000 a night as an escort. She’d found her way into that profession after becoming an exotic dancer when she was 18.
As she revealed on Dumb Blonde, “As you dance, you're gonna be offered money to go home with people,” and she wound up escorting for a very rich clientele, including “CEOs of oil companies.”
She made a whole lot of money
“I had sugar daddies who gave me half a million dollars,” claimed Bunnie. “I've had cars bought for me, diamonds, jewelry.” She was honest with Jelly from the start about being a sex worker, and he never had a problem with it.
If anything, he simply struggled to comprehend quite how much money she was making! He told Bertcast, “She was really making money in the sex work industry. Like, real money. Like, I didn't know that existed!”
Their wedding was spontaneous
In 2016 the happy couple decided to tie the knot in spur-of-the-moment fashion. They were in the crowd at a Yelawolf/Deftones gig in Vegas, and Jelly took it upon himself to ask if she wanted to marry him.
When she said “yes,” he didn’t want to wait. And as he told the King and the Sting and the Wing Clips podcast, “It was Vegas, right? So, it’s like 11 o’clock. They’re closing the joint down, and I’m like, ‘Let’s just go now!’”
“The backbone of my entire existence”
A stunned Bunnie said, “The courthouse is open for… 44 more minutes!” But this only spurred Jelly on even more. He was determined to seize the moment, so they quickly left the concert and made their way to the courthouse to become man and wife!
With this one spontaneous act, they had cemented their whirlwind romance. He later posted on Facebook, “I married my best friend. She is the backbone of my entire existence. I love you mama bear.”
Their marriage had some growing pains
Naturally, this isn’t to say the early years of marriage were without their pitfalls. In an episode of Dumb Blonde, Bunnie confessed, “I just think when you know, you know. But the thing is, when you get married that early, you also have to learn each other.”
She explained, “You got to go through the growing pains together, man.” This process of gaining an understanding of each other made the first few years a “rodeo” for the besotted — yet feisty — pair.
Hopping into the frying pan
Admittedly, the couple had one huge hiccup in 2018 which resulted in Bunnie posting an emotional YouTube video admitting they’d decided to break up. She cried, “I haven’t slept more than two or three hours in a week.” But mercifully they reunited soon after.
When explaining what it’s like to discover someone while already married to them, Bunnie explained, “You’re going to hang on because you guys don’t really know each other.” She described it as “figuring everything out and you hop into the frying pan [with] hot grease, but it’s so worth it in the end.”
Bunnie has a strong bond with Bailee
Over the years, Bunnie has truly embraced her role as stepmom to Bailee and Noah, Jelly’s son from a relationship he was in just before he met her. In 2020 Jelly wrote on Facebook, “It takes a special kind of woman to raise a kid that isn’t her child and still treat the child as if she was.”
He continued, “Bunnie is that special woman… Over the years watching her relationship with Bailee blossom into this beautiful mother-daughter bond that it has become has been nothing short of magical.”
Bunnie never wants to be like her stepmom
As Bunnie explained on Dumb Blonde, she resolved long ago to be the best mom she could be. Why? Because she never wants her children to experience what she did growing up. She admitted, “I had a pretty abusive relationship with my stepmother.”
She continued, “Which is why I am the stepmother I am to Bailee, because I learned from her that I did not want to be that woman. I never want to make a child feel the way my stepmother made me feel.”
Bunnie + YouTube = numbers!
In 2018 Bunnie decided to take advantage of Jelly’s increasing status in the music industry, and the profile this gave her, by starting some new endeavors of her own. She set up a YouTube channel to share her unique personality — amusingly self-described as “trailer park Barbara Walters” — with the world.
She would give makeup tutorials and document important life events, all while being 100 percent real and unfiltered, and it caught on. As of 2024 the channel has 700,000 subscribers.
Her audience just grows and grows
Alongside this, Bunnie also diversified into other social-media platforms — and enjoyed even more stratospheric success. She amassed 3 million followers on Facebook, and more than 5 million on TikTok.
The year 2019 was when she officially launched Dumb Blonde as another avenue for her to share her opinions with her fans, and it grew and grew naturally in its first year. She posted on Instagram that it averaged 30,000 downloads every month, and beamed, “Watching the podcast grow tremendously this year makes my heart so full.”
Working toward an end to sex work
In 2023 Jelly waxed lyrical on Instagram about his wife’s business journey — and also revealed the long-term goal behind establishing her own brand independent from him. He wrote, “I remember her sitting at our kitchen table and her talking to me about the vision she had to start the Dumb Blonde podcast.”
He then revealed, “It was her means to end working in the sex industry for good. I watched her build her own platform, her own podcast, and her own team with zero help from me.”
She didn’t want to simply be “Jelly Roll’s wife”
Jelly revealed, “She wanted to do it on her own. She didn’t want to be just ‘Jelly Roll’s wife.’ She wanted to build her own empire to empower women and share her story in hopes that it could motivate others to believe that they could change their lives and be happy.”
He added, “Watching you take this thing to the Moon has been nothing short of incredible to watch — so, so, so happy for you, baby. Let’s keep changing the world a little at a time.”
Turning to OnlyFans during the pandemic
When in 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Bunnie stopped escorting and turned her attention to a whole new booming internet venture: OnlyFans. She was able to make content at home and, to her astonishment, it quickly began earning her millions of dollars.
In a Facebook post, she remarked, “It was crazy the amount of money that site made me in such a short time.” Alongside OnlyFans, her podcast and YouTube channel continued to rake in dollars. In fact by 2022 these avenues began making more than OnlyFans.
“The best decision I ever made”
This was the fulfilment of everything she’d talked about with Jelly at their kitchen table; she would finally be able to give up sex work for good. She revealed, “I couldn’t justify still having that part of my life when the new brand I created was thriving so much… But my husband never once asked me to give up anything in my life.”
So, she retired from the business which had earned her so much money over the years and immersed herself fully in her other ventures. It soon became obvious that it was “the best decision I ever made.”
Scared to let go
Leaving behind something which had defined so much of her adult life — and provided for her lifestyle for so long — certainly wasn’t a decision Bunnie took lightly, though. On Facebook, she admitted, “I was so scared to let go of that part of my life and leave behind the money I was making.”
She confessed to not being entirely sure “how I’d make up that part of my business. But I had faith and let God have it, and he made sure I made it back tenfold.”
Making her own money has always been vitally important
Some fans couldn’t understand why Bunnie was still earning money with sex work seven years after she’d married a musician who went on to make millions. She explained, though, that she was an independent woman before she met Jelly, and she didn’t want that to change.
She wrote, “I have always worked and made money on my own. When I married J, I refused to give up my independence and rely solely on him.” She added, “He knew how important it was to me to make my own money.”
Bunnie and Jelly renew their wedding vows
The same year Bunnie finally left sex work in the rearview mirror, she and Jelly decided to renew their wedding vows at the same Las Vegas venue in which they’d married! Speaking on The Bobby Bones Show, Jelly revealed one of the more amusing reasons behind the new ceremony.
He chuckled, “Because we got married at like one o'clock in the morning, they let us pick our anniversary — so we don't know which day we actually got married on!”
They wanted a real anniversary date
With this ceremony, though, there would be no such uncertainty. Jelly explained, “This year, we will play Vegas on our anniversary, somewhere between August 30 and September 1. So, when I play Vegas that night, we’re going to leave the show, go straight back to the little chapel we got married at, and do it again.”
He smiled, “This way, we’re going to have a real date!” On top of this, though, there was another reason to do it all again: Bunnie hadn’t been wearing a wedding dress the first time!
Bunnie went to her fans for help with her wedding gown
“I’m going to wear a real wedding dress, since I didn’t the first time we got married in that little chapel in Vegas,” posted Bunnie to Facebook. Yet the right dress proved difficult to find — so Bunnie enlisted her fans to help.
She pleaded, “I’m having the hardest time finding an all-nude-colored wedding dress. I know some of my bride-savvy mamas out there know some designers or websites I can look on for one! Help, weddings are not my thing!”
Receiving harrowing news about her father
While 2023 was a happy year for Bunnie and Jelly overall, it was also a year of great turmoil. In September Bunnie received some news which knocked her for a loop: she posted on Instagram, “My dad has been silently battling Stage Four cancer for the past year alone with just his wife.”
She added, “He insisted no one know so he could try to heal it himself because he’s into holistic remedies. Sadly, the cancer has now spread into his bone marrow and his bones are breaking.”
Moving him to a hospice
Only two months later, an internet troll accused Bunnie of shameless promotion, all while her father “is laid up in a hospital dying.” Naturally, she wasn’t going to take that lying down. She fired back, “Actually, you roach motel of a human, he was moved to hospice.”
he continued, “But none of y’all know that because I’ve been dealing with him privately until my last video.” She added, “I’m making sure my father wants for nothing. I’ve been so blessed to have this time with him.”
Reuniting with a long-lost family member
Bunnie wound up reuniting with one of her mother figures in 2020 — but it’s maybe not the one you might think. Despite not knowing her birth mom for her entire childhood and adolescence, Bunnie wound up tracking her down when she was 22.
They gingerly entered into an internet correspondence, and that’s the way their relationship stayed for 15 long years. But in 2020 Bunnie finally came face to face with her mom, 37 years after she left. Naturally, she filmed a TikTok video documenting their emotional reunion.
She has more of her story still to tell
Bunnie has certainly lived an eventful life. And in January 2024 she revealed that any remaining mystery about it will soon be a thing of the past — because she’s going to write a tell-all memoir!
She told Music Mayhem magazine, “The idea for the book came about because I want every person who doesn’t think they can break free from where they’re at in life to know they can. Also, no one knows my life story except for what I reveal on the podcast, and I’m asked daily where people can find out more about my life story.”
A dream year
It was a fitting way to begin the new year, as Bunnie had just experienced the most successful 12 months of her life. She enthused about how amazing it had been on Instagram, saying, “2023 was one for the books! I can’t even believe the type of year we had. An absolute literal dream.”
She explained, “The podcast is now doing over 2 million downloads a month; we’re on Spotify’s top rising 15 pods of the year [and] Apple’s top 20 pods; and have accumulated over 50,000 Patreon subscribers.”
A testament to perseverance
Bunnie added, “I was able to produce and direct our reality shows with my own production company — which y’all are absolutely loving! In a world that has made me prove myself over and over, my hard work finally speaks for itself. 2024 is even more content for y’all to consume!”
The success must have felt like just reward for a woman who consistently refused to take “no” for an answer and kept believing in herself even when her dreams seemed like they were out of reach
“It never matters where you came from; it matters where you’re going”
“I also retired from an industry I had been in for 20-plus years and rolled the dice on myself,” reiterated Bunnie. “Everything I manifested this year, I accomplished — and then some.
“Honestly it’s almost unbelievable and makes my heart flutter when I think about how much I spoke into existence.” She added, “It never matters where you came from; it matters where you’re going, baby! Don’t ever let anyone tell you [that] you can’t do something and believe them.”
A message of positivity for her fans
Bunnie also sent out a message directly to the legions of fans who have experienced similar trials and tribulations in their lives. In 2023 she wrote, “I stopped surviving and started living. I refused to allow my anxiety and depression to keep me in the dark.”
She stressed, “I promise if you suffer like I do, the darkness is there to show you the light and you aren’t alone. If all you did was survive this year — Hell yeah, baby! Rock on!”